BY AMY NOVOTNEYSearch for parenting books on Amazon.com, and you get tens of thousands of titles, leaving new parents awash in a sea of often conflicting information. Butthanks to the accumulated results of decades of empiricalresearch, psychologists know more than ever before about whatsuccessful parenting really is.

The Monitor asked leaders in child psychology for their bestempirically tested insights for managing children’s behavior.

“When it comes to nagging, reprimand and other forms ofpunishment, the more you do it, the more likely you are notgoing to get the behavior you want,” says Kazdin, APA’s 2008

president. “A better way to get children to clean their roomor do their homework, for example, is to model the behavioryourself, encourage it and praise it when you see it.”But parents shouldn’t offer that praise indiscriminately, saysSheila Eyberg, PhD, a psychology professor at the University ofFlorida who conducts research on parent-child relationships.

Eyberg recommends parents provide their children with a lot of“labeled praise” — specific feedback that tells the child exactlywhat he or she did that the parent liked. By giving labeled praise